


Little Brother

by itsalwaystheapocalypse



Category: Shades of Magic - V. E. Schwab
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, As will other characters, Blood Magic, Danes take what they want, Dark Magic, Holland Vosijk and Rhy Maresh will make appearances eventually, Kell Maresh as White London Antari, Partial Mind Control, Villains, villain point of view, what if Kell were born in white london, white london finds kell first
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2020-12-07 21:02:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20982326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsalwaystheapocalypse/pseuds/itsalwaystheapocalypse
Summary: Just a play on the question of "What if Astrid and Athos found Kell first?", only positing that Kell Maresh was born in White London's world and falls into the hands of Astrid and Athos Dane. It is probably not exactly how you expect this to go.There will be more chapters as I go!Dedicated to pinkcupboardwitch, eternally enabling me





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pinkcupboardwitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkcupboardwitch/gifts).

They found the boy when the warriors were combing through the rubble. Astrid Dane, one-half of the warlords running this particular rampaging army, was digging through for spoils right alongside them - it was a poor ruler that would send her men and women out to fight but did not stand beside them. 

If you gave your loyalty to Astrid Dane, without reservation and without compromise, Astrid would give loyalty in return, plus an open offering to loot and pillage and rape and burn to your heart's content.

Those who swore but did not uphold their bargains, however… well, some of them were here, too, combing brainlessly on command.

Athos did not like those who broke their oaths. The others saw the example the Mindless set and upheld theirs. No one wanted to spend time as her brother's plaything, after all.

Athos had a tendency to break his toys apart and put them back a little… _ askew. _

The wind, whipped up high by the favor of the gods, had blown the fire in just the right direction. The warriors had only had to make a few kills at the end, fight off a few stragglers with swords but little else in their favor. 

_ She _ hadn’t set the flames going, of course; that had been Athos. No magic needed, only a firestarter and a little bit of dried grass and wood.

_ Never rely only on magic in a world where the magic could be gone any day now, _that was Astrid’s rule, and Athos too.

They supplied the fire. The gods had done the rest.

She pulled the little silver charm out from under her black leather armor, fit against her like a second skin, setting off the pale white skin, pale blonde hair that went whiter each time she drank blood again, darkening the appearance of the veins along her eyes and mouth and jaw. She kissed the little charm, the face of the god who had fathered them, the god whose favor she sought each day. “_ Kiitos, _” She whispered to it, and dropped it back securely underneath.

You thanked the gods for what you were given, that was something Mother had taught them early. Especially when your_ father _ was one, you thanked the gods.

They had been born lucky, that much was true - but most importantly, Astrid and Athos Dane were born _ resourceful. _She had never let a moment she could use to her advantage go to waste... which was why they had taken the time to burn a tiny village.

It meant nothing, in the scheme of their march across this pastureland. Strategically worthless. But the people had cared about it - the rebels had fought to the death for it - and so there must be a resource here, something they were hiding. Perhaps simply fertile earth, or a good deal of livestock. Maybe a mine over in that hill over there.

She had burnt the rebels and their shit village to the ground, and now she and her brother would find what they had been protecting here or, well, at least they’d had the fun of killing a lot of people to sate them.

It helped the warriors to keep their morale up, if they got to occasionally have a bit of sport and fun under their warlords’ watchful, indulgent gaze.

Her hair was blown around her by the wind, whipping the white-blonde into her face, the two braids she’d made in the morning pulled loose from their pins to hang on either side of her sharp cheekbones and ice-blue eyes, slightly upswept and feline. 

The black veins around them were still mostly grayish-blue; she drank only the blood of her men who volunteered - and the spoils of war who were volunteered to her as tribute - and she would not have the black veins for many years, she thought, assuming she had so many left to live.

A collapsed hut at the edge of the village had promise - magic floated around it, heavy in the air, redolent like bubbling, boiling stew. She could almost taste it, sparking along her skin. This blissful blistering magic she did not know, had never encountered before. 

It felt like its own world, its own life, its own mind. She could almost hear the thoughts, whispering in little voices. Perhaps the rebels had been hiding a bit of the rampant magic here, the other worlds’ killing magic.

Killing magic could be made into a weapon - she need only find some and figure out how. If that was what raised the hair on her arms, her neck, what made her scent the air like a hunting dog with a fox in its gaze, she would call it quite the find indeed.

Worth the time they'd wasted on a pissant hill at the very eastern edge of their territory.

Astrid Dane moved to clear the rubble around the hut herself, while the men and women around her hunted for spoils. They found things here and there - family heirlooms, jewelry, that sort of thing. Some of the living were found and put either to sport or to the sword, depending on who found them. Mostly, they found corpses, and those went to the bonfire in the center of the town, built high and strong and hot to burn the bodies.

It was only just, to ensure that the other rebels could not pull a drop of magic from the bodies once the Danes and their army had moved on.

There was a way you did these sorts of things - burn, attack, pillage, and then… then you salted the earth, burned the bodies to kill their magic, and moved on.

She found two bodies in what had once been the door of the little house - a tall, strong man, blond-haired. He looked like he might have been worth something in a fight, if he’d chosen the right side. But he had chosen to stand with the rebels and died with them, too. A redheaded woman, next to him - the scent of some kind of elemental magic still lit the air, faintly, around her, but what good had her magic done her when they were burning her village to the ground faster than she could fight the flames?

Astrid smiled, blew the woman a kiss. “Farewell, lovely,” She said softly, and closed the open, horror-struck eyes.

The man, she gave a final kick in the ribs.

Then there was a shift in the pile of wood at the back of the hut. 

Astrid looked up, surprised. A cat or dog maybe? There were still animals out here in the country, although she’d heard they fled the city in droves.

Odd, though, that the animal had not run when the flames came close enough to heat the air.

She stepped across bits of broken stone and busted-up wood, swept up a small golden necklace she dropped into the leather bag she strapped around her waist. give that to a favored warrior to melt down and sell later, gain herself further loyalty with the army.

She found a dagger, too, buried and ash-coated, and swept the ashes away to reveal it. It was a lovely thing indeed, and she let her fingers trace the initials K.L. engraved into the hilt. 

She’d have to keep that one.

Then the shifting again, a push of wood clattering onto a bit of brick, and the sound of a low mewling cry, hoarse with smoke.

Definitely a cat, Astrid thought, and moved over to clear the wood away. It was bad luck to ignore cats in need - they were favored animals by her god, after all. She pushed a bit more wood, cleared a few bricks, wiped sweat off her face only to smear ash along the line of her cheekbone.

She jumped back when a small hand shot out at her, fingers wide, groping blindly. "What…?"

Astrid reached out, let her long cold fingers close around the little hand, and pulled a small boy from the rubble.

He was alive, breathing and conscious, and that in and of itself was a miracle. She stared at the source of the overwhelming _ magic _she felt all around her, and it was… just a child, five years old at most.

Ash was ground into his hair but she could see the red underneath, pale skin nearly the color of her own smeared with gray. He blinked up at her, coughing a dry, wracking cough, and she could not stop staring at his eyes.

One was a beautifully warm blue, wide and curious.

The other had no whites and was instead an inky, glossy, glassy black from corner to corner, as though someone had removed the blue and replaced it with an obsidian stone. She took him by the chin, lifting his eyes to meet hers.

"I know what you are," Astrid said in a low, soft voice. "No wonder they all died to keep you a secret."

The boy’s eyebrows furrowed together, the slightest little crease between. The wide eyes began to glitter as they watered, and Astrid turned him from side to side, then stood him on his feet, feeling across his shoulder, arms, searching for broken bones, broken ribs.

Nothing. 

This boy had had a burning building fall on his head and all he had to show for it was a bit of a cough and a bump on the head already turning into a bit of a goose-egg. That'd ache by morning, she thought. 

“I don't know where I am,” The boy said in a smoke-choked voice. “Are- are you my mother?” He coughed again, and began to cry, tears cutting tracks through the ashes and mud. “Ssshhh,” Astrid murmured. “Sssshhh, my child, you’re safe now.”

She swept him up into her arms, feeling the magic _ flowing _off of him in waves, effortless and easy as breathing, as blinking, as bleeding. She swallowed hard against a rush of saliva - no, no. He was too young, too untrained. Astrid Dane was many things, but she was not a killer of children.

That’s what the army was for.

“Sssshhh, little one, sssshhh. It’s all right. Did you use air to keep yourself breathing?”

He nodded, holding out his hands like a dog trained to do a trick, and a little bit of air blew Astrid’s hair where it hung in her eyes, pushed it to the side. 

“Did you use earth to smother the flames before they burned you?”

The boy nodded again.

“Did you call to your bones to grow harder against the wood so they would not be broken?”

One more nod, still with the wide dark eyes, trembling mouth, the tears running down his face. She held him closer, felt small arms go up around her neck, holding on tightly, shaking little hands.

“Can you use the fire, and water, and blood?”

“I d-d-don’t know blood,” The boy said hoarsely. “They’re going to teach me blood when they find the, the books. Are you my mother?”

“No, child, but I will care for you,” Astrid Dane said softly, lovingly. The boy did not smile, only stared wide-eyed at her, blue eye and black in his soot-streaked face, and after a second, nodded. 

She stood herself up straight, shifting the boy over so he rested on her left hip and not her right, where her sword was. “I’m not your mother, my darling, my dear,” She said, cooing the words. “I’m going to be your big sister.”

She looked over her shoulder and cried, “Athos! Come here!”

Her twin brother, identical to her in nearly every way - right down to the black leather that wrapped around him as though he’d been born wearing it - came over with two men, one at either elbow, his most trusted seconds-in-command. “What, sister? What did you find?” He blinked, surprised. “A child? Throw it on the fire with the others, I guess.”

“No, Athos, my love. Look!” She turned so he could see the boy’s eyes as he stared, still uncomprehending, up at Athos Dane. 

“_ Magtfulde _,” Athos murmured, lips barely moving, staring with awe at the little boy with the very important eyes. He looked uneasy first, and then the twins’ eyes met. The knowledge of what Astrid intended to do came to him all at once.

They had always understood each other - after all, they were just one person split in half, the demigod children of the trickster god.

“Astrid,” Athos said thoughtfully, his voice warming to the thought. “You have found us an _ Antari. _ How long until we bleed him?”

“I will not be bleeding him,” Astrid said, gently tucking a strand of red hair behind the boy’s ear, smiling at Athos’s confusion.

The boy closed his eyes and tucked his head under her chin and she felt her smile soften at the feeling of the fuzz of red hair, tickling her neck. The heavy weight of him on a hip unused to the weight of children. “My light, my other half, my soul, I have not found us an _ Antari. _I have found us a baby brother.”

“Brother…?” The boy asked, and his voice was slurred a little, sleepy. He must have been kept awake all night by the people trying to save him - and then by the noise and the screams and the flames and then the terrible, perfect silence.

She wondered, idly, how long those two in the doorway had lived, trying to protect him from the death that Astrid Dane did not intend to give him. 

Astrid shushed him again, soft as a whisper, and let her free hand move up to stroke through his hair to soothe him. “Yes, child. You can be our brother now.”

“Brother,” The boy repeated, and kept his eyes closed. 

“Does he have a name?” Athos asked, moving closer. His seconds looked at each other, shrugged, and moved off to continue the pillaging. Her twin reached out, sort of tapped a knuckle against the boy’s chin in a way he’d seen adults do to children. 

“It doesn’t matter if he did,” Astrid answered, the boy’s breathing already beginning to slow. “He’s ours now, and so he will have a new name. What do you think?” Athos studied the small round face, the closed eyes with their long copper eyelashes, the bright shock of red hair you could see underneath all that ash and dirt. The magic still settled around them like ozone after a lightning strike. Athos leaned down, until he was close enough he could have killed the boy, or kissed his forehead, or done any number of things. He only looked, head cocked to the side, like a wolf inspecting a baby fawn.

Then his eyes raised back up to his sister’s and he said firmly, “Aleksandr. We will call him Alek.”

“Hear that, little brother?” Astrid said to the boy, already too asleep to hear her. “You are Alek Dane now, and you will stay with us forever.”

“I love him already,” Athos said, shooting her his most rakish, carefree grin.

“Liar,” Astrid teased, and the two of them, matching white spectres in black leather with long white hair blowing in the high, hot winds that still whipped up around them, began to walk with the child back towards the line of trees you just could barely see along the horizon, where the camp was. “You don’t love him yet.”

“I will, though,” Athos said thoughtfully, kicking aside a woven basket as he walked. “I will though, if he is to be one of us.”

“He is a Dane now,” Astrid said with a firm nod. “He’ll be our _ Antari _because he is our brother”

“Will we bleed him one day?”

“Only if he offers out of love. Besides… if we have found one _ Antari, _ brother darling, who is to say we won’t find another? There are rumors of an _ Antari _loose in London, down in Makt, after all. And you know what they say..."

“_Antari _can never be let loose to live on their own. Oh, that would be nice,” Athos said a little wistful, a little dreamy. “It would be nice to have two.”

"So we'll have two. But first... we should get to know what our new little brother can do."


	2. Bleed

The swords had all been cleaned and put away, their great white warhorses brushed and stabled, and Astrid Dane was tired down to her bones.

Tired, but triumphant.

“Bring me my brother,” She ordered her steward as she entered the longhouse, the greatest and tallest of them all in the town they had made their own. Selnek nodded quickly, scurrying away, and Astrid slowly rolled her head around on her neck, stripping off the black leather armor as she went, handing it off to the Mindless servants her brother had made.

The leather did the job, but you could only wear leather for so long before you craved some simple fur and fabric. 

When she was down only to the smallclothes and the charm to her father-god, she smiled, stretching her arms over her head, pulling on a loose white shirt and pants, feeling freed of the constriction of her armor. 

It had been a good six months, riding the edges of their territory, putting down a few bands of rebels, and scouting the boundaries of Makt. They were in a war, in London - but then when weren’t they? - and she and Athos had been able to learn some very important information indeed.

There_ was _ an _ Antari _ in London, that was true. Her own age, more or less, a black-haired man she’d watched in a bar one night. Athos was off picking out souvenirs for Alek off of the bodies of people who might have information for them, and Astrid had settled in with one of their seconds, the two of them watching the _ Antari _drink and keep very much to himself.

They couldn’t take him - on his own, he was more powerful than she and Athos combined. All she could do, for now, was watch.

Black hair. Green eye. Careful, too - he scanned the room every so often, kept his beer close to him so no one could perhaps slip anything in when he wasn’t looking. He’d no doubt be a prize for any warlord, but Astrid had already marked him in her own mind, and she did not want anyone else to get ahold of her things

Even if, strictly speaking, they weren’t hers yet.

In any case, scouting was done, and they were home, and that meant warm fires and good meat and that meant her lovely, loving little brother.

“Astrid!” Alek came running into the room ahead of Selnek with his arms open, red hair wild around his face and his own god-token swinging from the silver chain around his neck, and she caught him in her arms.

Somehow in only six months it seemed her eleven-year-old little brother had shot up like a weed, nearly as tall as she was. He was all elbows and knees and bright red hair, dressed in a simple black top and pants that, other than color, nearly matched her own.

Escorted by two of the Mindless everywhere he went - not that he needed the escort, granted, but appearances mattered when you were turning a small warband into an empire. No, Alek was the most naturally powerful magician she had ever seen, except perhaps the _ Antari _brooding in the bar in London, and here he was still a good five years from maturity. 

It wouldn’t be long before he was taller than she and Athos, she though, clutching him tightly to her. The children grow so fast, and she had not even been granted the gift of his babyhood, only the child and soon to be the man.

He smiled at her, a flash of white teeth below the blue-and-black eyes, a smattering of pale freckles across his cheeks and nose. She let her hands slide up to either side of his face, looking him over, and he twisted away good-naturedly from her. “You’re back, _ sisko! _ I missed you!”

“I missed you, too, _ pikku veli. _But London is not a safe place for you to go, not yet. Don’t you fret, though, my darling. We will make it safe for you, when it is ours. It will be the safest place in the world for you.”

“I want to go with you next time,” Alek pouted slightly, then backed away from her, showing her the sword that hung at his left hip, the mirror image of hers. “Look! I made my own sword while you were gone.” He pulled it from its sheath and Astrid took the blade, looking it over appraisingly, while Alek danced on the balls of his feet, watching, waiting for her approval or derision.

She looked up at him, with a slow, curving, feline smile. “Well done, _ pikku veli. _Your first sword is a thing of beauty.” 

His face brightened at the praise, and when she handed him back the sword it took his three tries to get it back into the sheath, he was nearly shaking. 

“So you have been learning swordmaking, while we were gone?”

“Swords, and fighting, and magic,” He rattled off, counting them on his fingers. “And books.”

“Yes, Athos thinks the books are an important part of education, too,” Astrid said a little soothingly. 

“What do I think?” Athos said, ducking his head under the low door as he entered, his shirt and pants utterly identical to his sisters. 

“That book learning is an important part of any young warlord’s education,” Astrid said, rolling her eyes. “As though books can teach you how to move horses and men.”

“They _ can _ , Astrid, I’ve told you a thousand times that books are _ full _of information about troop maneuvers and-”

“_ Isoveli _, I made a sword!” Alek pulled the sword back out to show Athos, who gave it a much closer look than Astrid had, testing the weight, holding it out in front to check the straightness of the blade. 

“I like it, _ pikku veli, _but I don’t think this will cut off many heads. You’ll need more training to make a sword you can take to kill with.”

“Well,” Alek said, a little uneasily, “I don’t, um, I don’t want to kill anyone, though.”

Athos and Astrid both blinked, surprised, turning slowly to look at him. “You what?”

“I don’t want to kill anyone?” Alek repeated, his voice lilting up into a nervous question at the end. The two of them stared at their redheaded little adopted brother, the boy Astrid had found in a burning building, the boy they had raised as a Dane, one of their own.

It’s unheard of, a Dane who doesn’t relish the kill.

“Why not?” Athos asked, baffled. 

“I just don’t want to. I’m sorry, _ isoveli, _I, I know I should, but…”

“Sssshhh, Alek, it’s all right,” Astrid soothed, sliding an arm around the boy’s shoulders. He leaned into her, just barely still able to tuck his head against her face and under her chin. By next year, he won’t be able to do that any longer, and Astrid’s heart breaks at the speed with which she is losing the boy and watching him turn into a man.

A man she can - and will - use, but still her baby brother, still Alek Dane, _ Antari _to the warlords who will one day take London. She might have wanted a few more years of the child, even though she is the one pushing him to learn the blood magic that will make him a weapon for her above all others.

To be so conflicted was… uncomfortable, for Astrid, and so she simply pushed the thoughts away. Alek is here, and he is a Dane, and he belongs to she and Athos and that is all that matters.

“You will never be asked to kill before you are ready,” Astrid said with firm sincerity, squeezing her arm around him. After a moment, Athos joins them, putting an arm around him from the other side, and she catches the hint of a smile on her little brother’s face. He’s always been quiet, his emotions largely kept to himself, but she has made it her mission in life to never be the cause of his scowling.

“Never before you are ready, swear on my honor as a Dane,” Athos rumbled, resting his own head on top of the boy’s, and the three of them stood together for a moment, three hearts beating as one, the two white-blondes with their darkening veins and the redheaded boy whose only markings were the freckles and that single black eye.

_ Danes, _ Astrid thought, _ through and through. _

When they pulled apart, the boy moved without hesitation to the dagger that hung from a peg on the wall, the one marked K.L. that Astrid had once found in a bit of rubble and thought must have belonged to the man and woman who had tried to stand between her army and the little boy.

He pulled the blade out, turned to look at his brother and sister and asked with only the slightest discomfort, “Do you need me to bleed today?”

“It’s been a long six months,” Athos said, patting him on the back. “What do you think?”

“_ Kyllä, pikku veli, kiitos. _ Will you bleed for us today?” Astrid let her fingers run through his red hair, straightening it where it threatened to fall over and hide his black eye. “Ah, _ veli, _ I don’t like this hair. Never hide what you are.” She took him by the narrow chin, lifting his face so his eyes met hers, looking at him head-on. “I am not ashamed of you. You should never, ever hide what you are from the world. If the world does not like your power, we will burn it down for you. _ Kyllä?” _

He smiled at her, a little nervously, and nodded. “Yes, Astrid. I will bleed for you.” 

She and Athos took a seat at the familiar wooden table, Athos lounging back in it like it was one of those puffy cushioned things the lazy rich sat on, Astrid with her back ramrod straight as always. 

Alek rolled up his sleeve, slowly, and there were a few scars lining his wrist, but only a few. For the most part, they never let him cut for too long.

He took a deep breath - and she could see the pulse flutter in his neck, his heartbeat spike just a little. Then he drew the blade across his wrist, digging in deep, and winced at the hint of pain. Astrid held out her goblet, and then Athos his, and when there was enough blood to sate them, Astrid put a hand on his arm and said, “Enough, _ veli. _”

He stopped digging in the blade immediately, nodding, taking the bit of cloth she handed him to press against his skin. It would close, soon enough - but it had been a long six months, and they had needed more blood than usual from him.

This wound would probably scar, but he gave his blood freely for them, and that was what mattered. Blood given freely had a spark to it, a taste, that blood given against your will did not.

If they had bled the five-year-old, they would have gotten one meal, maybe two. 

This way, she would always have more blood, and she had a brother, besides, who wanted to give it to her.

Alek all but collapsed into his own chair, face pale from blood loss, freckles standing out against his white skin. “So much this time,” He said, a little weakly.

“I know. _ Olen pahoillani, veli. _We were gone so long. Weren’t you happy to see us, though?”

He brightened, and she loved the way he looked when he was happy. “I am happy. I missed you both while you were gone. Did you bring me anything?”

Athos laughed, sipping their brother’s blood. “Of course we did! Let us finish our meal, first, and then I will show you. I have brought you back your very own horse!”

“My own?” Alek sat up too fast, blinking rapidly as he went dizzy, putting a hand up to his head. “Ah. Oh.”

“Sit back, my light,” Astrid murmured. “Don’t hurt yourself on our account. We will show you once dinner is over, and you may name him, then.”

“Did he have a name before?” Alek asked, looking from one of them to the other.

“Does that matter?” Athos asked, with a shrug. “He’s ours now, and we will give him a new name.”

Astrid smiled at her brothers, her perfect twin and her perfect baby brother, as she sipped from her own goblet. His blood was hot and rich, and _ Antari _magic sparked along her tongue and filled all of her own veins with starlight and power. She and Athos would burn the world down for their baby brother, and he would bleed himself for her. 

That was all that mattered.


	3. Can't Wait

“London will be a problem.”

Astrid frowned down at the sketched out map of the city. Selnek had some cartography skill, so they’d had him do the actual work, while the scouts, Athos, and Astrid herself all described the parts of the city they knew best. It looked fairly accurate to her, but at the same time, she worried they’d left out some key detail.

“No more than the other cities we’ve taken,” Athos said with a shrug.

Ikor, Athos's second, the commander of the armies, and the only person not born or named a Dane that dared disagree with the warlord and future true king, frowned at him. "Other cities did not have a king with an  _ Antari _ ." He tapped the three fingers that remained on his left hand on the table, squinted at Athos with his scarred, rough face. 

Ikor had been an enemy once, when Astrid and Athos had first begun - but an enemy who knew how to read the winds and chose to ally himself with those the gods clearly favored, and now a trusted almost-friend.

Ikor was a very smart man - the others, who had chosen to meet the Danes in battle rather than go down on their knees, had been very stupid, and were now very dead.

"Especially not one with such a bad  _ attitude,"  _ Astrid said pointedly. "Our scouts report Holland Vosijk will not even meet with anyone outside of Vortalis’s influence, but he is not loved by London.”

“Ros’s loyal guard dog,” Athos snorted. “His enforcer. He’s not prone to gentleness, is he?”

“I’m not sure we’re in a position to judge,  _ minun Hallitsija.”  _ Ikor continued tapping his fingers thoughtfully. “Considering your plans all involve the slaughter of a tenth or so of the population.”

“Decimation has been out of fashion since before the great doors closed,” Athos said with a casual, uncaring shrug. “I merely hope to bring it back in style.”

“We will create our  _ own  _ style,  _ veli, _ ” Astrid said affectionately, patting his arm. “The two of us and our  _ pikku veli  _ will be in the history books one day.”

“If the world lives long enough to have more history books,” Ikor muttered.

“It will!” Alek spoke up, sitting in his very own chair at the war council table for the first time.

He looked thoroughly out of place - tall and skinny where everyone else was shorter and muscular, all knees and elbows where the rest were all war veterans with physiques cut and honed by the fighting. His skin was a pale beige and freckled where Ikor had a flush of pale tan to his, where Astrid and Athos were white-skinned with blue-gray veins slowly turning black, year by year. He looked a delightful mix of thrilled and nervous that made Astrid smile at him, now and then, just to give him a bit of comfort and reassurance that he deserved to be here. She smiled at him now. 

“It will,” Alek repeated, earnestly, “if my  _ isoveli  _ and  _ sisko  _ have me and the other  _ Antari,  _ this Holland, to serve them. He and I can open the doors together, I am sure of it.”

“You’re my brother,” Astrid said lovingly. “Not my servant, not my slave, not my thrall. You will never be forced to do a single thing against your will. We have no idea how difficult it will be to bring these doors open. I cannot ask you to risk yourself.”

If only, Astrid thought privately to herself, because she knew she did not have to.

“But  _ he  _ would be your thrall, and I serve you,  _ sisko _ ,” Alek pointed out brightly. “He must be very powerful, to serve the king of London. When he serves you, he will do your bidding, won’t he?”

“Of course,” Astrid replied, waving one hand in the air. “Athos assures me the  _ Antari  _ fall to the curse like any man.”

“Then… I have an idea,” Alek said, and his voice dropped, went a little shy and uncertain.

Ikor looked at Athos, raising an eyebrow. “Must we entertain the ideas of inexperienced children,  _ minun Hallitsija?” _

“You will entertain the ideas of  _ this one, _ ” Athos said firmly. “He is more educated in tactics and strategies than you are, Ikor.”

Ikor looked over at Astrid. “He’s a child.”

“Athos feeds him all those  _ books, _ ” Astrid sighed, feeling herself blessed with the patience of some sort of god-blessed saint to put up with Athos’s obsession with Alek being  _ educated. _

Ikor looked at Alek for a long moment of silence. The boy sat up straight, put his shoulders back, set his jaw as though he thought it might make him seem more a man. 

“Ikor,” Athos said, a warning in his voice. “He is our brother, and he will rule beside us.”

Ikor slowly nodded. “The will of my king and queen - and of my prince - be done.”

Everyone at the table relaxed, and Astrid Dane, queen of the Northern Lands and soon to be queen of London and Makt itself, sat back, appraising the boy she had once pulled from the rubble of a town she herself had leveled with new eyes. 

At fourteen, he was several inches taller than she was now - had grown all at once, it seemed, between his thirteenth and fourteenth summers. She’d woken many times in the longhouse at night to the sound of his movements in his sleep, shifting in pain as his bones ached with the sudden growth and his skin now bore red lines along his back and thighs where the skin had been forced to stretch too much too soon. He cut his red hair short rather than growing it long like she and Athos did, but it meant he showed his black eye to the world rather than trying to hide it, and Astrid was proud of him for beginning to truly embrace the immensity of what he was.

She’d even caught him trying to shave, one day, the bit of patchy stubble that grew on his jaw and chin - she’d had Athos show him what to do after that.

Athos and Alek were thick as thieves, these days, riding out to scout together, training to get Alek’s swordsmanship to where it should be, reading the endless books that Athos found hidden in the monasteries in the thick dark forests.

He was less her  _ pikku veli  _ than he had ever been, and still, still he promised to serve her with scars on his arms and a pure and shining love in his eyes. Still he begged for a seat at the war council table, still he asked to be informed about the progress of the capture of London and of the London  _ Antari. _

All too soon, he would be grown, but he would not be going anywhere.

No, Danes did not leave each other, they did not abandon their family. And Alek was a Dane in his mind and his heart, if not in his blood.

“I want you to bind him to  _ me, _ ” Alek said, putting his hands on the table. 

“Alek,” Athos said gently. “You dislike causing violence or bloodshed on your own.”

“I still will, though, if you ask me, won’t I?”

“This is true,” Astrid acknowledged, one hand out to stop anyone who might feel the need to protest. “You made your first kill, on our command, when you were thirteen, as is right and proper for a Dane.”

A shadow passed over Alek’s face - he had not killed well. Alek had been ordered to kill with a blade and not with magic, and the poor boy had thrown up beside the bloodsoaked body until he had nothing left to lose. Athos had had to nearly carry him back to the tent, and he’d had nightmares for weeks afterward. But now he killed alongside them when he needed to and kept his stone face. He did not like it - but he would not throw up again, he would not be embarrassed like that again, and so Astrid felt no need to bring up the unpleasant memory.

“I’m your  _ Antari _ ,” Alek said, looking from Astrid to Athos and back again.

“You are not  _ just  _ our  _ Antari, _ ” Astrid said firmly. “Never, ever think that,  _ veli.  _ You are Aleksandr Dane, you are one of us, you are so much more than just the magic in your blood.”

“I, I know that,” Alek said, rolling his eyes, but the deep flush that swept his face gave away how pleased he was to hear it. “But the point is that I’m still the  _ Antari  _ who serves your will. I’ll be the blade in your hands, the magic you wield. Let the London  _ Antari  _ be bound to me, and then he will do my will as I do yours.”

“You have never owned a man.” Athos frowned, but the interest in the idea was there, and Alek could see it in his face. Astrid watched her two brothers look at each other, her twin and her youngest, and saw the way Athos was genuinely, truly considering the option. “You will not find it easy,  _ pikku veli. _ He will fight. He will try to convince you of the rightness of his freedom and then kill you if you remove his binding.”

“I won’t,” Alek said sincerely, leaning forward, his eyes entirely on Athos now. “I won’t, I promise. If he and I work together, I’m sure we can make it warm again.”

“He is  _ Antari,  _ like you,” Astrid said, but she could see in the set of his jaw and the fire in his pale blue eye that his mind was made up, and she could not dissuade him. “What if he calls on the bond that you share in your blood to convince you?”

“He is  _ Antari,”  _ Alek said, nodding. He sat back, rolling up his sleeve to show the scars that lined his left arm. “But he is not  _ Dane.  _ You tell me I’m more than my magic,  _ kyllä?” _

_ “Kyllä,”  _ Astrid agreed.

“If I am anything, I’m a Dane,” Alek said. “I am Aleksandr Dane, and I am your  _ pikku veli  _ first.”

Athos and Astrid looked at each other and smiled, and in the way of god-twins, they each knew the other’s thoughts immediately. Any doubt as to Alek’s strength was gone, in that moment.

Astrid leaned over to put her hand over his wrist, to trail with a fingernail the line of a particularly long scar. Alek looked up at her, blue eye and black shining. “Well? What do you say, Astrid? Can I take charge of him?”

“I say,” Astrid said quietly, but with a quirk to her mouth that showed him she was smiling, and his grin in return showed her that he knew what the half-smile meant. “I say that it is far past time you were gifted your very own thrall, my love.”

“We will give him Holland Vosijk?” Athos asked, and the question was a simple formality, but it had to be asked at the war council nonetheless. Astrid nodded, squeezing Alek’s hand once.

Athos looked over the long table. “All in favor?”

Astrid and Athos raised their hand - after a moment, Astrid nudged Alek. “You are a part of our council and you must vote, too, my darling.”

Alek raised his hand straight up in the air, as high as it would go, all at once.

Ikor hesitated, considered the fourteen-year-old Dane prince, and then raised his hand as well.

The other generals, who had sat silent and thoughtful, raised their hands one by one once they saw that Ikor agreed.

“All are decided,” Astrid said formally. “Ros Vortalis’s  _ Antari  _ Holland Vosijk will be spared in the invasion. He will be formally bound to the crown prince when my brother and I take London’s throne. He will be the sole property of the crown and will be under the will and command of Prince Aleksandr Dane. No one else may touch him but a Dane. No one else may harm him but a Dane. He will be our slave, and our thrall, and Alek will be his ruler. Does anyone object to our will in this matter?”

The table was silent. 

Astrid smiled as she saw their steward, Selnek, step up from where he had stood, waiting to serve, and put a proud hand on Alek’s shoulder. Her smile widened when she saw Alek look up and back, the shine to his eyes, the pride in his bearing and in the way he sat up straight now, squared his shoulders. 

“Our will be done,” Athos said in his low, deep voice. “May the gods smile on our choice, and may they weep for Holland Vosijk.”

“To the will of the god-blessed, the killers, the Danes!” Astrid said, and raised her tankard high above her head. Her brother followed suit.

Alek could not raise his quite as high, but he did his best. “To the Danes!” He said brightly, and his voice cracked and jumped too high on the last word. 

Alek blushed bright red, and everyone else at the table politely pretended not to notice.

“To the Danes!,” the generals cried as one, and raised their tankards, splashing mead onto the table in more than a few places. 

“I hope you enjoy your new thrall,” Athos said to Alek, eyebrow raised. “You will have to help me bind him, I’ll have to use your blood.”

“I don’t mind,” Alek said softly. “I give you blood all the time.” Athos leaned over to ruffle his hair and he smiled, ducking his head a little bit. 

Astrid and Athos fell into conversation with their generals, and Alek sat, looking happily down into his mead. There was no menace to him, to malevolence, no sense that they had decided anything about the impending ruination of a stranger several hundred miles away, in a city Alek had never seen before.

Alek took a deep breath, looked from side to side. No one was watching him. No one would hear what he said. They were all talking to each other, and at least three were singing drinking songs, and none of them were singing the same one.

Into his mead, Alek whispered his secret.

“I can’t wait to meet him.”


	4. Holland

“I’ve been thinking about the boy,” Ros Vortalis said, sitting at a low table in his room with his _ Antari _sitting beside him. 

They’d been playing Ost for some time, a game of strategy and risk which Vor was known to be a master at, but he’d been distracted tonight, and Holland Vosijk was surprised to discover himself slowly winning the game.

Surprised, and uneasy.

He wasn’t sure he’d ever actually won against Vor - most of the guards here wouldn’t even agree to _ play. _

“Which boy?” Holland asked, knowing very well who he meant, trying to sound dismissive and nonchalant. 

He didn’t want to think about the strange redheaded northerner that rode closer each day on the heels of his brother and sister, such as they were. The Danes were slaughtering everything in sight, each village or town they took lost one out of every ten even if they surrendered, and more than that if they refused. 

Most surrendered, given the choice.

There had been stories coming in from survivors of towns that even agreed to do the choosing themselves for extra mercy, picking out their criminals and unwanted people to be sacrificed to the Danes. 

They called themselves god-blessed.

There were frightened stories told over fires in taverns all through Maktahn London - that the Danes were born of a trickster god's misspent night with a powerful witch, who fooled the trickster god into her bed and then birthed blood-drinking magicians who could not be beaten. 

They must have invented the story themselves, and it was ridiculous, but as their conquests continued, even Holland had to admit they seemed preternaturally lucky.

Vor pretended not to be worried - he had an _ Antari _ himself, after all - but Holland knew he still felt some nervousness and had been taking precautions at every entrance to the city, sending out scouts and spies to get a better look at where they might go next.

The scouts, to a man, reported small warbands rather than a proper army, but Ros Vortalis was too smart to find that comforting, and so was Holland.

The Danes were on the move, and they had their sights set on London.

The city held its breath, waiting - and part of what they waited for was the sight of the scrawny blue-eyed _ Antari _on the white warhorse who stayed always just behind his siblings, a circlet of silver on his head, the crown prince and bloodied bottle of wine that belonged to the Danes.

Their little brother, whose name was never spoken aloud, who rode behind his siblings and who, it was said, wore innocence as a mask over a killer’s soul. 

How could anyone raised by the Danes be anything else?

His name may not have been known outside the warbands that followed the Danes themselves, but survivors all reported seeing the boy in black armor - that he used his magic only sparingly and chose to fight with a sword when he could.

They said they’d seen him cut himself in full view of everyone, weeping blood into goblets for his brother and sister to drink, bleeding until his skin went nearly as white as theirs - one man had knelt before Vor and described the boy fainting dead away from blood loss, being bundled up and away by the twins' silent steward, while Astrid and Athos crackled and sparked with the magic they took from his veins.

Holland’s skin crawled at the thought of it, of a boy that age being coaxed to open his veins, again and again, for people who called him _ brother. _

“The Dane boy. The northern _ Antari. _” Vor sat back, considering the chips he held in his palm, rolling them back and forth between his fingers thoughtfully. “Astrid and Athos have a reputation for ferocity, Holland, but they are only magicians, and not as strong as you. Indeed, they're only stronger than me on a good day because they always fight together and drown in blood. But this boy…”

“This _ boy _is fourteen at most, and even that is disputed,” Holland said derisively, snorting, dropping his own chips onto the table and grabbing the stein that sat always at his elbow. “I am not a child, but a man with his full power at hand. He’s likely to be hardly a breeze, in the end.”

“We need to consider him as a serious _ threat, _ Holland.” 

“Why? Even the scouts and spies report that he rarely kills, and does so poorly. He’s been seen feeding them blood like two bats more than casting a single _ Antari _spell. Why consider him a threat?” Holland asked, not quite sneering.

Vor looked up at him, considering the green-and-black gaze that looked back. “Of all the ways to die, Holland, only a fool chooses arrogance.”

Holland paused, catching his king’s eye, the stein frozen halfway through its journey back to his mouth. “Do you think me arrogant?”

“Immensely, Holland. You have earned it, in your way - raised in the Kosik, fighting and bleeding and clawing for every breath. But you are not invulnerable… and neither am I.”

“Neither is the boy,” Holland countered. “I think I can handle a half-feral _ child, _Vor. I was one of those once. I know what I was like at his age.”

“At his age,” Vor said thoughtfully as a servant entered carrying a tray laden down with a loaf of bread, a bottle of _ kaash, _and a pile of thin cigars, “You had not spent the majority of your life being trained to rule with bloodlust like he has.”

Ros took up one of the little cigars, and Holland leaned over to offer the flame that snapped effortlessly to his fingers.

The servant bowed and left the room without speaking, and Holland had enough time to think to himself that he’d seen her a thousand times before and she’d never been so silent and looked so completely empty in the face before she was gone. 

Perhaps only preoccupied with the worry that every Londoner seemed to feel these days, watching the seas and the land all around them for a sign that the northerners were coming. Perhaps only that

Holland seemed to be the only person in London who was not in any particular way frightened of Athos or Astrid Dane. They were only human, only magicians - powerful because they drank blood, but even drinking an _ Antari’s _ blood (or _ child Antari’s _blood, Holland thought with a slight curl to his lip) did not make you one.

No, Holland was the only true _ Antari… _other than the child himself. In a fight between them, Holland would bet on his age and experience to win the day.

He had survived every single attack thrown his way - had survived time on the streets with no food and no place to rest. He had lived through young adulthood with a target on his back in the form of his single black eye. He had been hunted, over and over, by Vor himself before agreeing to stand by his side and help him try to build a better kingdom. 

He had survived everything, and he was not afraid of a cosseted princeling who had never had to fight for anything, not really not in any way it mattered. 

He was Holland Vosijk, the personal_ Antari _ to the king of London, and he did not fear a child.

“He is _ Antari,” _ Vor said simply, now, as if echoing Holland’s very thoughts. “He is a threat simply by existing in a place where he has no loyalty to us - where indeed, his loyalty is to Astrid and Athos _ Dane _instead.”

“Petty warlords,” Holland countered, and moved a chip onto the board. “Simple magicians with delusions of grandeur, Vor.”

“I wasn’t anything more than that, once,” Vor replied, and moved one of his own. They sat, staring at each other for a moment, in silence, and then Ros Vortalis took a long drag on his cigar.

He held the smoke in his throat, for a long moment, and then breathed out the cloud. In a strange phenomenon, the cloud did not quite dissipate immediately, but seemed to pull together as if moved by an invisible hand coalescing into a nearly solid mass before it simply disappeared entirely.

“Vor, did you see that?” Holland asked, but Vor had had his eyes closed, enjoying the pleasant buzz of the smoke in his lungs, and only shook his head. 

Later, Holland would remember this as the moment he should have been afraid - or at least recognized the warning that a boy _ Antari _had attempted to give him.

Later, he would think to wonder how long someone had been hidden in the room without he or Vor ever realizing they were there.

Later, he would have plenty of time for going over his mistakes, and where it all went wrong. What _ he _ had done wrong, how _ he _had failed to protect the life he had worked so hard to build. 

In the moment, though, he only waved the strange behavior of the smoke off, told himself it was a trick of the light, a trick of his eyes. 

He and Ros went back to their game, and Ros drank the _ kaash _ while Holland stuck to his beer. He needed a clear head, and _ kaash _ was one of the few weaknesses Holland would openly admit to - he held his beer just fine, and most hard liquor did little more than give him a headache the next day, but his mother had succumbed to a mix of the sweet smoke and _ kaash, _and Holland suspected he had some kind of inherited weakness for it, too. 

Ros smoked one cigar, and then two, and they did not talk about the boy any longer - in fact Holland found Vortalis less and less forthcoming, not his usual talkative self, and he began to watch him more and more carefully. 

Vor wasn’t usually a melancholy or silent drunk - and it usually took more than a single bottle of _ kaash _to make him any kind of drink - but Holland finally stood, stretching his arms “Ros, I think you’ve had enough - and the gods know I am tired, myself.”

Ros Vortalis looked up at him with foggy, drink-soaked eyes, gave a small, silent nod, and tried to stand. 

At which point he simply collapsed onto the ground with a dull _ thump, _pulling the table with him, clattering onto its side and scattering the Ost board and pieces everywhere. By the time Holland had gone to his knees next to his king, Ros Vortalis was already dead.

“Vor! No, no, _ no!” _ Holland grabbed a piece of thick shattered glass from the _ kaash _bottle, then jerked his hand back as it burned hot against his skin. 

The king was still, staring up at the ceiling, the strange pale irises seeming more like scratched glass than a man’s eyes. His mouth hung open, and what Holland could see of the inside was blistered and red.

“Guards,” Holland managed to choke out, and it came out something like a hoarse whisper, choked-off in his throat. He tried again, and this time a true shout came from him, something desperate and frightened, _ “Guards!” _

No one was coming, he knew that somehow. He knew things were too soft, too quiet, too still here. Still, he called, again and again, scrabbling to get enough of a grip on the boiling-hot glass shards of the _ kaash _bottle to look. 

Holland recognized scrolling cursework on the inside of the bottle, and quickly stood to his full height, spinning to stare at the door. He drew his blade, prepared to face the enemy, having no idea who the enemy was.

But, of course, Holland Vosijk was powerful, and that power might have made him arrogant, but he still knew who had the greatest designs on London, and so he thought he had a fairly good idea of who had killed his king.

His friend.

Holland made it through the door only to see the King’s Guard dead on the floor just outside, bottles lolling from their hands across the floor, burning scars in the stone where the liquid had pooled.

Further down the hall, he could see another set of dead guards, more softly smoking burns where simple liquid should be. 

Holland had no idea what to do.

His heart beat in his chest, a pounding drum, and his own pulse and the rush of blood in his veins was so loud he didn’t hear the soft sound of someone opening the door to Ros’s wardrobe and stepping out behind him. 

He chose a direction at random. Left, maybe? Later he wouldn’t even remember which way he had gone, his mind had been a haze of rage and grief. There had probably been spells cut into the walls, hidden behind tables, in either direction. 

They had probably planned for every contingency.

And Holland had planned for none.

He didn’t see the spell until it was too late - barely had time to be surprised as the world slowed around him, dragging as if through water and not air, and he stumbled off balance, falling slowly to one knee in a motion that seemed more like floating down from some great height - impossibly slow, entirely inexorable.

He heard laughter, nearly identical, from both ahead of him and behind.

Here was laughter like he had never heard before, cold and sharp, a laugh that made him think of the great icicles after certain winter storms, the kind that can kill a man if they fall from a great enough height. 

Holland had seen a man felled by one of them once, how it had gone straight through him like a great rock, perfectly clear in the light of day, entirely deadly

The sound of their laughter was like the look on the man’s face as the icicle had pierced him right through.

“Look, _ velis,” _ A voice said. It was the one from behind him, the slightly softer laughter. “We hardly had to try at all. _ Pikku veli, _what a prize I’ve caught for you.”

He knew this voice, though he had never met her.

Holland tried to turn to face her, at least wanting to look his enemy in the eye before he would be slaughtered, to keep his head high and die with honor and dignity, but he could not move fast enough. 

There was magic in his fingertips, magic all throughout him, magic in his veins and buzzing in his mind and his mouth, but he couldn’t not move fast enough, caught in the spell, to call on any of it. 

He caught the dance of white hair out of the corner of his eyes, skin nearly the same color, eyes flat as the dangerously thin ice atop a lake in early winter. By the time he opened his mouth to curse her, she was already on him, a grip like steel, like stone, grasping onto his jaw and forcing it closed again. 

“Hello, Holland Vosijk,” The woman said, and when she jerked his head back to look at her he could see the black veins around her eyes, spidering down her skin, running like obsidian down her neck. “My, you are such a pretty thing, aren’t you? They don’t say you’re pretty, when we speak with the spies.”

He fought to spit out a curse, call on a spell, but she pressed a hand to his back and lightning lit his body in a sudden flash of pure agony that made every muscle go rigid all at once until he thought his bones might break from the unendurable pressure.

Holland _ screamed. _

When she pulled her hand away, there was a _ crack _and a new pain he did not understand, could not know, wrapped around his neck. Holland fought to breathe, the loss of air making him panic, his hands trying in terrible slowness to rise to his neck and pull himself free.

He watched a man just like the woman, but for his slightly larger build and height, walking towards him slowly winding the handle of a whip around his fingers. “Our _ veli _ has been so worried you would not survive, but we did our research, eh? We know you do not drink the _ kaash.” _

“We know your mother did,” The woman said, in a voice that might have been teasingly flirtatious in anyone else. 

“We know everything about you,” The man said thoughtfully.

They turned to look down at him as one, Astrid and Athos Dane, and Holland stared up at them with his muscles shaking, unable to even attempt to get to his feet, whip wrapped around his neck leaving black spots dancing at the corners of his vision as he fought, desperately fought, to breathe. 

“I’m not sure our _ veli _is ready for this,” Astrid murmured. Fury warred in Holland with confusion at words that made no sense to him. 

“We will make sure this dog only bites when he’s told,” Athos replied, in a tone of brotherly reassurance, as though Holland were not slowly suffocating and choking to death right in front of them. “It is high time our _ veli _took a slave for his own.”

Holland’s eyes went wide with sudden horrified comprehension.

“Oh, look, it heard me.” Athos laughed, and the sound bounced off the walls and around the inside of Holland’s skull. Astrid moved around to the side of him and cast the lightning again, and Holland heard his own screams as though they came from someone else, far away.

How he could scream and then not have the breath to speak was beyond him.

Somehow, the screams still came.

Athos reached down, and Holland could do nothing - he was still frozen from the spell and from the lightning Astrid had sent coursing through his body. He could not breathe to cast a spell. He wasn’t even bleeding. Athos Dane took his chin in his hands and Holland looked up into a face that was utterly, implacably inhuman.

“Now,” said Athos Dane with a slow smile, “What to do with you?”

_ "Lupasitte että hän oli minun, isoveli!" _ A young, clear voice called out, stubborn and insistent, a voice that broke into the pain that shattered Holland's thoughts, even as he gasped for air and the whip wrapped around his throat seemed somehow only to tighten.

From Ros Vortalis’s room he saw a lanky, tall, thin figure come walking easily out. There was a glimpse of hair that was still largely bright but beginning to fade to copper, a flash of freckled skin.

The boy pushed past the other two and dropped to his haunches in front of him, wearing black leather that matched his siblings’ armor, with a sword strapped at his side and a thin dagger held in one hand - Ros's dagger, taken right out of his room, off his body. Holland could still see, although the dancing spots had grown larger, and there was a bit of exposed skin built into the boy’s armor where he could cut himself to fight.

Holland Vosijk stared into the blue-and-black eyes of the _ Antari _ Dane Prince, eyes that were wide with delight.

Holland didn’t know if he was delighted to see him on his knees, unable to breathe or to fight back, his bones still singing with pain - or if the boy had simply enjoyed the whole thing, and Holland was merely a sideshow for him.

The boy reached out and touched his own forehead with the tips of his first two fingers, then touched Holland’s. "My respect to you for your wisdom in helping your king hold London," He said quietly, solemnly. Holland could only stare, in pure shock, as he repeated the gesture on each side of his face, and then over his heart. "My admiration to you for your vision of a better London, a living world. My affection for you as someone like me."

"I..." Holland managed to gasp. "am not... like... _you."_

The boy leaned slightly closer, and the blue eye and black filled Holland's entire field of vision. He could see a smattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks, one spot just slightly darker than the rest beneath his glossy black _ Antari _eye. 

"Yes, you are. You are Holland Vosijk," The boy said. "We know all about you. Pleased to meet you, Holland Vosijk."

Holland, fighting for air, could not think of a single thing to say.

"My name," The boy said softly and with a note of compassion utterly at odds with the malevolent good cheer of the two who stood behind him like proud parents, "is Prince Aleksandr Dane. You will call me Alek and I will call you mine.”

_ Alox? _ Holland thought, in a sudden well of horror, as though the ghost of his brother had leaned over behind him and started to laugh. _ His name is Alox? _

Alek rested his palm over Holland's heart. "I name you mine," He said, voice low. "By the favor of the gods who bless the Danes, you are mine."

Athos snorted. _ "Puhu enemmän uudella _ thrall _ uudemmalla, pikku veli." _

Holland did not speak their language, but he knew the word 'thrall'.

"No," He ground out, fighting to rise again, managing to push himself into a crouch, groaning at the pain of the movement. “I will n-not be cursed! No, I will not-”

"You kneel until your prince tells you not to, Holland." Athos tightened the whip, and the black spots dancing in Holland's vision became claws that pulled him back, back and back. "Do not worry. Soon enough you won't have to worry about having a choice."

Aleksandr Dane's face went a little sad. He smiled, just a little, the way you might smile at someone with a stomach wound to ease them into death. 

Then he stood, and the three of them stared down, Astrid and Athos with identical fierce victory, and Alek with a quiet happiness that was somehow infinitely, inexpressibly worse.

“I will see you when you are done, Holland Vosijk," Aleksandr Dane said.

Athos pulled the whip even tighter around his neck, and the black spots grew and grew.

Darkness like clawing hands pulled him under, once and for all.


	5. Curse

Holland might have appreciated the gallows humor of it all, if he had had enough blood left in his body to think that clearly. 

In his life, he had been surrounded by - had drowned in - death. Alox was dead, as was Talya - both of them had tried to take Holland’s life and both had died as a result. Two people he loved. 

Ros was dead, the closest thing he’d had to a friend, even if he had been able to understand that Vortalis used him as much as he liked him, and that with Vortalis the two concepts - friendship and usefulness - were largely the same. He had never had any delusions that Ros thought of him as anything but a tool - just a tool who happened to be a good listener with a decent hand at Ost.

He’d never play a game of Ost with Ros Vortalis again, not until they both were dead. It would be a long time before the Danes would let him die.

Even in the fog of agony, he understood that much.

Holland’s mother was dead, long ago slumped over and lost to the _ kaash _and sweet smoke. His father… what did he know of his father’s death? It all ran together, dripped through his mind the way his own blood ran in rivulets across him to pool on the stone table he was laid on. How had his father died? Or had he simply run off, when his mother’s reliance on the smoke became too clear, too obvious, and her neglect of her sons could no longer be hidden behind closed doors?

It didn’t matter. If he hadn’t died, he was dead now. _ Everyone _was dead, except… except for Holland himself.

Wasn’t it funny? A little? That of them all, Holland was the only one who had ever genuinely wanted to die?

There was some kind of irony in that, but he couldn’t quite chase it down. The thought danced along with the sparks of pain in the fuzzy blackness behind his eyes, rattled in his mind like the chains that kept his arms stretched above his head, his legs splayed out to each corner of the stone table. A sacrificial lamb, here to bleed to bring new spring flowers in a world that saw so few any longer.

He would have been fine with dying like that.

But he wasn’t really here to bleed the world back to life. It would never be so easy to save a world as that. No, the Dane twins, and their_ Antari _brother, did not intend to let him die.

His limbs were held down by chains and his jaw forced shut by a kind of vice locked around his head, something made of soft leather forced between his teeth. He could bite down on it, when the pain was too much to bear. He had done so often enough that his teeth now pushed into divots made by the days of pain, of screaming wordlessly. It was almost more comfortable, to bite down, than to do anything else. Holland tried not to see it as a kind of mercy, because the Danes had none.

His skin burned hot, a fever of panic and agony - he let out a moan, a sob, sounds even more animal than that as Athos worked on him. The Dane’s white hair and blue eyes swam in and out of his vision as Holland drifted through whole new worlds of pain. 

He didn’t scream, at first, but too soon he found out that that wasn’t a victory.

“Oh, you are beautiful silent,” Athos whispered, against his ear. Sparkling with delight at the strength he had all the time in the world to wear down at, a drip of water carving a canyon through what Holland had once believed was an already-empty soul. He knew better, now. “But I would rather hear you _ sing.” _

Eventually, jaw locked and eyes wide and bulging, Holland could do little else but oblige him.

Athos stood back, at some point, and wiped the bloody blade off on Holland’s stomach, leaving a smear of red to join with all the rest. Open wounds wept, struggling to close with the Antari’s stubborn healing, even as he’d lost so much blood he had no more left to heal himself with. “I don’t think you will give me any more of yourself than this,” Athos mused, tapping the flat of the blade on the flat spot of Holland’s pelvis.

He jerked - he couldn’t help himself - and let out a low, soft sound so full of hatred that it was unmistakable, even when he could not speak.

Athos laughed - low and soft, a dark sound. He tapped with the knife again, trailed the edge in little circles around Holland’s hips. He never quite cut in, only watched Holland’s body tremble with the urge to escape but no ability to move. “I think you are ready,” Athos continued, speaking idly, as though they were two men sitting down to play cards. “I’m not sure if my _ pikku veli _ is. He’s young and he does not kill well. But _ you do, _don’t you? They say you kill without conscience, without remorse. Just like us.”

_ I am not like you. _He’d said it to the boy, the red-haired prince. He tried to say it now, although he knew all that came through were groans and grunts around the leather forced between his teeth, harsh panting breaths, pink-tinged saliva that ran in drool from the corners of his mouth around the gag.

“Sssshhh, don’t try that, now,” Athos murmured, smoothing charcoal-colored hair from Holland’s eyes with absurd tenderness. “No, no, pretty thing. Listen to me. My brother is… soft, in his heart. He would sing spells rather than carve them into bone, like we do. He would worry about the_ fate _of a people we might conquer, if they did not bow quickly enough.” His thumb smoothed back and forth over Holland’s temple, just over his left eyebrow, and Holland closed his eyes with disgust at the way his body wanted so badly to take comfort from it. “But you don’t worry about anyone but yourself, do you?”

_ I worry about the world, not its people. Every person I’ve cared enough to worry about is dead. _

Athos moved away from him, to another small table. The sound of low scraping, a mortar and pestle, made him turn his head as best he could to look. Athos crushed something to a fine powder and then poured the powder into a bowl of black ink that seemed too thick, somehow. “We would have taken you anyway, but my brother makes a point. If we give you to _ him… _Astrid and I can take care of ourselves, and each other. We always have. But my brother needs someone who can help him to do the things we have read in the books. To walk between worlds and through walls, to make the world dark or light, to open the doors between us and the fat red worms who fed on our starvation… the monasteries kept the old secrets. We have plundered them all.”

He swirled the bloodstained knife through the ink, the blade dripping crimson and black. Holland knew the first steps of a curse when he saw one, and the chains rattled as he pulled ineffectually on them, letting out the first true sound of fear, rather than pain. Athos _ shuddered, _pleasantly, to hear it.

“That was lovely. Feel free to make that sound again.”

Holland’s eyes - the only part of him that moved with any sense of freedom - followed Athos’s pristine white-skinned back, shimmering with sweat and run with dark lines that followed his blood, as he went to the door. _ “Pikku veli! Tule loppuun työtä!” _

There was a pause, and then Aleksandr Dane ducked into the room. The door was a little shorter than he was and Holland watched him fold himself slightly to move in, dressed in loose black clothing now, a strange opposite-image to his smiling older brother, who looked at him with such genuine, true fraternal love.

It made Holland sick to see it.

How had his own brother tried to kill him for his blood, and here the heartless, merciless Danes could look at a powerhouse they held in their hands with true, loving affection? How was that _ just? _ How was that _ fair? _

Holland had once thought himself beyond caring about that any longer, but the thought of Alox’s final expression was marked in his memory, and he began to make a sound he barely recognized, barking, harsh snorts through his nose that only barely resembled a bitter laughter. 

“_ Veli?” _ Aleksander looked to Athos, head tilted slightly so a lock of coppery-red hair fell over his black _ Antari _ eye. He and Athos spoke quickly, in their strange tongue that stuck like sticks in Holland’s feverish mind. He kept staring at Aleks, the fading copper hair, the soft dusky blue of his eye. He was so _ young, _ couldn’t have seen more than fourteen winters now at _ most. _And here he was, consulting with Athos in a torture room, utterly undisturbed by the pool of drying, thickening blood at Holland’s back, on his arms, wiped across every clean inch of skin.

Aleks glanced his way, and his words faltered mid-sentence. 

Holland stared, incredulous, as the redhead gave him a slight, nervous _ smile. _

He tried to say _ fuck you _through his gag, but only the same muffled, pointless growls came out. Athos chuckled at the sound and went back to speaking to Aleksandr, who nodded seriously, his hands nervously working at each other, eyes flickering between Holland and Athos, there and back again.

Black dots began to dance in Holland’s vision, threatening to drag him back under into the cool velvety darkness that had shielded him from the worst of the torture he’d lived through. He groaned, letting his head fall back onto the stone table, and looked nearly-sightlessly up at the slightly rounded ceiling. He’d helped Ros torture people in this room, dissidents and false claimants, challengers to the throne. He’d once held the knife.

It was funny, a little, to have it turned on _ him _now. He’d thought Ros Vortalis the Someday King.

What if it was meant to be Athos Dane, all along?

_ “ _ _ Ota tämä, veli,” _Athos Dane said, handing Aleksandr the blade. Aleks closed his fingers around the rough hilt, looking over the mix of black ink and blood that filled the hollowed-out designs along the inside. Aleks tilted the blade to and fro, watching the bloody-black liquid slosh, held inside by the magic the blade had been crafted with. 

“What do I do?” Aleksandr asked, and his voice trembled, a little.

He was a child, but in Makt there were no children, truly - only infants, adults, and the smaller adults that were weaned from milk to violence and nothing in-between. Hadn’t there been Mayday, when Holland’s father was young, still? Ribbons wrapped ‘round the Maypole, to celebrate the spring?

How many more springs would there be?

Athos, having to push up onto the tips of his toes to reach, kissed Aleksandr’s forehead, gently. _ “Tee hänestä sinun, Aleksandr,” _Athos said, patted him on the shoulder, and stepped away. For a second, watching blearily, Holland thought he would leave. Instead, Athos took up a place by the door, leaning his back against the wall, arms crossed before him. 

Athos Dane, blue eyes cold as the glaciers that still flattened the land to the north, watched as Aleksandr stepped up to the side of the great stone table, looked down, and his _ Antari _eye clicked against Holland’s, like flintstone and sparks.

“I’m sorry,” He said, softly, “That you must be broken like this. This isn’t what I would have wanted for you.”

Holland grunted, behind the gag, but he hoped his question was clear enough, in its way. _ What would you have wanted? _

“You might think you know,” Aleks whispered, with real regret. There were tears standing in his blue eye. “What they have planned for us.” The knife hovered, dripping ink and blood and malevolence, above the unbroken skin over Holland’s heart. “You have no idea.”

He leaned over, to Athos’s encouraging hum, and Holland felt the first touch of the curse as the tip of the blade pierced him.

\---

By the time Aleks was done, there were trails of tears down the teenger’s face, and Holland was limp, barely breathing around the leather bit in his teeth. All he knew was the stone table. The faces of his loved ones flickered faded and barely remembered, in the fog of agony. He had loved them - had a single one ever loved him in return?

Was every _ Antari _since the closing of the doors destined only to be the slave of a monarch who could bind them, by love or by ink and blade?

Holland’s head buzzed with magic, the knowledge of so many spells at the tip of his tongue, but he could feel beneath them that a vital part of their strength was stripped away, removed, gone for good.

No… no, it wasn’t gone. It had been _ buried. _If there was a flicker of hope to be had there, it was that. He could feel himself, his power and agency, buried under the weight that pressed firmly against his will.

His eyes had closed, at some point, so he could weep without having to see Athos’s expression of delight at his tears. Aleks had wept, as well, his face pale as he performed a magic forbidden by law, practiced only in the darkest corners, by the darkest men. A boy, carving curses at the behest of his beloved older brother.

There was as much cruelty to Aleks, wasn’t there? Cruelty, if not pain.

“Are you finished?”

The voice belonged to the other Dane. Holland managed, with every ounce of strength he had left, to turn his head and open eyes that felt glued together by the shame. Astrid had entered, at some point during the carving, and stood alongside Athos by the wall, near the door. Her arms were folded, one narrow hip jutting out beneath her black leather armor. 

Athos only shrugged, without moving from the wall. “Nearly so. Aleks is not an artist, Astrid, but his hand is steady. Finish up, Aleks.” 

_ “Joo, Athos,” _Aleks murmured. He was clearer in Holland’s view than his siblings, leaning over him still, finishing the final lines. His blue eye was red around the edges, as though he had been the one crying and not Holland at all. The boy finally pulled the knife back and set it carefully down next to Holland on the stone table. 

His fingers could very nearly brush the hilt. Holland had a sudden wild fantasy of his binding snapping free, grabbing the knife, plunging it into the heart of the young _ Antari _and forcing his siblings to watch him bleed out on the floor, a useless tool broken by Holland’s hand-

Astrid clicked her tongue, and his focus switched back to her. “I still don’t know if this is a good idea,” She said calmly. That she spoke in Common Maktahn was a sign she wanted Holland to hear and understand her. This was a performance for him as much as a conversation with her brother. “Aleks is good with horses, but will he be so keen to be master to a pet that can bite?”

Athos snorted, finally pushing away from the wall, moving over to the table to brush some of the charcoal-black hair from Holland’s forehead. “What good is a guard dog that cannot? He will serve.”

Athos picked up the blade - so close, so close to Holland’s fingertips and then suddenly so far away - and sliced carefully through the leather straps that held the bit in his mouth and locked his jaw shut. Holland moaned at the pain, involuntary and helpless, as his jaw finally opened for the first time in days. He choked in breath, coughing on old blood, as Athos continued to cut through his bindings. He sliced through the straps at his wrists and lowered his arms, muscles screaming pain with every movement. Holland only panted, hissed at the pain. He would not scream again.

_ He would not scream again. _

When he breathed in, all the spells in the world were there, buzzing on his tongue, but they wouldn’t go further than his teeth. He had not bled too much to cast them, he realized. It was only that he was no longer the one to give his magic the command.

Astrid cut the ties at his ankles with her own knife, and the two of them stepped forward, one on either side, taking his arms to carefully sit him up on the table. He blinked at them, furious, full of vengeance begging for a way out, and he could have killed them both with a word.

He _ wanted to. _

He could not. 

Aleks stood at the end of the table, watching, and Holland could have _ rent him _ limb from limb and splattered his entrails to the ceiling but he _ couldn’t. _

The curse carved into his skin wrote its rules in lines of ink mixed with his own blood. He could not close his mind to it - it had burrowed deeply within him while Aleks carved, taken root there. It was a tree stronger than any Holland had ever seen in life, blackened limbs that took the blood in his veins and bent it to-

Not to their will, he thought. Not the twins.

It was _ Aleks _ his blood sang to, when he looked. It was _ Aleks _ his magic would answer to. Aleks’s _ Antari _power made the chains around his own magic sleek and nearly comfortable, hard to feel at first. They weren’t the stiff, articulated things that a curse written by the twins might have been. They coiled not just through his mind but around his limbs, weighed as little as a feather and were stronger than iron.

_ Obey, _ they whispered, and Holland felt a strange spike of something like awful gratitude as he whispered they did not speak to his mind or heart. Only his hands, his lips. He had to obey, but thank the old gods, he did not have to _ want to. _

The twins helped him to the edge of the table, and he was still swirling with the fresh horror of what had been done, too lost in it to remember to try and fight them, or even try. When he had been aided to stand, with Aleksandr Dane watching him with a look of a horror nearly identical to his own, Athos leaned over and whispered, lips moving against his ear, “Kneel.”

Holland did not, at first, obey. Not out of some genuine idea of rebelling against it, but because - because he did not _ have to. _

Not until Athos turned and gave a look to his little brother, and Aleks cleared his throat and said, “O-... Obey me, Holland. Kneel.”

A blow like stone struck Holland between the shoulders, forcing him downward until his knees cracked against the stone. He stared upwards as his legs folded, panting open-mouthed. “Please,” He managed. “Please, _ Antari.” _

“Obey,” Aleks repeated, in a whisper. 

“He will obey your every command,” Athos said confidently, “From now until his final breath, or yours. Your will is his, and he will have no other.”

Holland wished they would go back to speaking in their own tongue, and spare him the humiliation of hearing his own damnation. But, of course, him hearing it was nearly the entire point.

“_ Joo, veli,” _Aleks said softly. “I… I thank you for this. He is my… my bodyguard, now?”

“Bodyguard, and tutor, and anything else you require of him besides.” Athos smiled, his hand resting lightly on Holland’s shoulder, as if petting the head of a beloved hunting hound. Holland considered turning his head to bite, to be the beast Athos had named him.

Astrid clapped her hands together. “Shall we see what he will do for you, Aleks?”

She stepped out, and it seemed only moments before a boy was dragged him. Holland recognized him, with a deep horror. Only as old as Aleksandr, bedraggled and already bloody from beatings. He wore wide, uncertain eyes, and he was begging before they forced him to the floor.

Athos put a knife in Holland’s hand, and he could not turn it on any of them. His fingers curved around the hilt even as he would have done anything to drop the knife to the floor. 

“Cut his throat,” Athos commanded. “Give the order, _ veli.” _

Aleks stared between Holland and the boy on the floor, who twisted in the grip of the guards who held him, weeping helplessly, _ no, no, no, _and Holland’s whole body felt like it twisted in guilt when the boy wailed a plea to at least be taken to see his mother before they killed him.

Aleks did not speak the order. He gave no command. He only stared, at the boy, and at Holland.

Then, quietly, he said, “No.”

The hand on Holland’s shoulder tightened as Athos blinked, he and Astrid staring in stark surprise. “What?”

“I said no. Holland will kill no one who does not need to die to save my life. That is my command.” Aleks’s voice started out shaking and strengthened with time. Holland felt the order settle into his bones, wind around the magic. _ Kill no one who is not a threat to Aleksandr Dane. _

Astrid sighed, disappointed. “Aleks…”

“_ Ei, sisko.” _Aleks shook his head. “I don’t want a murderer. I want someone to teach me to be stronger, and better, at what I am. Stand, Holland.”

Holland’s hands flopped onto the floor to balance himself as he carefully got his balance and pushed himself, swaying and dizzy from blood loss, to his feet. 

“We have to kill anyone who might fight on behalf of the former king,” Astrid said. Her voice was quiet, and Holland thought at any moment they would force Aleks to give the order, but they didn’t. He chanced a look, to read their faces, and found to his surprise… sympathy, in the look they gave their little brother. “We can let no one live.”

“He’s a kitchen boy.” Aleks had to pitch his voice louder to be heard over the boy on the floor’s sobs. “He will harm no one. Let him live, send him home to his mother. Show the city of London that the Danes do not come as the same bloodthirsty monsters as every other king, that we are not Ros Vortalis killing everyone in sight-”

Holland’s lip curled, but he couldn’t find his voice - not from the curse, just from exhaustion - to argue against the insult to Vortalis’s reputation. 

“-we are something _ else, _ something _ different. _Show them that, that you can be… the Someday Queen and King of London.”

Holland’s head snapped up, and he stared in shock at the teenage _ Antari _who had spoken his own wildest dreams for Vortalis out loud. 

Astrid and Athos shared a glance, then looked back to their brother. “By showing _ mercy?” _

“Anyone who fought you, do what you please. But this boy only washed dishes. Those in the stables can saddle _ your _ horses, too. The girl in the kitchens can bring us breakfast. None of them have to die, Astrid. And those who do… I won’t have Holland kill them. Not so long as he belongs to _ me.” _

In the end, Astrid and Athos allowed Aleks to take Holland, staggering and limping, from the room. They watched, their white heads together in low conversation, as Holland followed the redhead, could do nothing else for however long he was allowed to live. 

Still…

Despite his grinding hatred, a millstone turning all his pain and shame and sorrow and grief into a fine dusting of loathing he would wear like gold thread woven beneath his skin for the rest of his days, he could not let the mercy go unacknowledged.

His fingertips reached out to just touch Aleksandr’s sleeve.

“Y-your Highness-” His voice was hoarse from screaming, breath whistling painfully in his throat.

Aleks stopped to look at him. This close, he could have counted the freckles on the boy’s face. He had one dark one just below one eye that stood out above all the rest. “Yes?”

“Thank… thank you. For n-not making… making me kill-”

“You’re… you’re welcome.” Aleks smiled at him, just a little, and then he turned and kept walking. “Come on. I’ll have someone draw you a bath. Follow me.”

Holland did not try to fight the order, he knew if he did, he would only hurt himself and fail. He was a puppet on strings, but he had not been forced to cut down his own people, and that was a mercy the Danes themselves would never have allowed if it hadn’t been their own brother to ask for it.

Somewhere inside of him, the scream that had begun inside his mind gradually lowered, and Holland understood that Aleks had allowed him to keep some hint of his magic’s voice.


End file.
